Lars Iyer's Blog, page 54
September 27, 2013
Our taste for literature which arises from [the imaginati...
Our taste for literature which arises from [the imagination of disaster] is a natural one, yet it has in it this danger, that we may come to assume that evil is equivalent to reality and may even come, in some distant and unconscious way, to honor it as such.
Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self (via)
This advertisement [the WWF panda] is an instance of the ...
This advertisement [the WWF panda] is an instance of the image of reasonableness English people project very successfully. I believe they induce in themselves an enormous moral security, which always prevents them from faulting themselves for anything worse than stodginess or ineptitude or excessive vulnerability to foreign influences. Hearing themselves expound as slick as you please on every great question of the age, abhorring racism, despising the thought of nuclear deterrence, scorning nationalism and militarism, appalled at the spectacle of poverty, they must feel that their gift to the world of moral enlightenment exculpates the racism, poverty, nationalism, and so on with which their own country is grievously afflicted.
Marilynne Robinson, Mother Country (via The Vaulted Fool)
September 25, 2013
New philosophical interview at Review 31. With Marc Farra...
September 9, 2013
Reading in Newcastle, 26th Sep, 7.1.5 PM. With Patricia D...
Reading in Newcastle, 26th Sep, 7.1.5 PM. With Patricia Duncker.
Venue: Culture Lab, Newcastle University. Details here.
September 5, 2013
I can't listen to music too often. It makes you want to s...
I can't listen to music too often. It makes you want to say stupid, nice things. Said Lenin.
Living in a single attic room at The Hague for the last seven years before his death at forty-four, Spinoza was known to sometimes go as long as three months without once stepping out of doors.
Nothing preposterous can ever be said that hasn't already been said by one of the philosophers. Said Cicero.
How many things there are in this world that I do not want. Said Socrates, strolling through a marketplace in Athens.
Melville, late along, possessed no copies of his own books.
Very great is the number of the stupid. Said Galileo.
Rank vegetable growth, Rebecca West called the sentences of Henry James. One feels that if one took cutting of them one could raise a library in the garden.
O, what a number of lies this young man has told about me. Said Socrates, the first time he heard Plato read one of his dialogues. Says a legend recorded by Diogenes Laertius.
The only writing I've ever been jealous of. Said Woolf of Mansfield.
Keep apart, keep apart and preserve one's soul alive - that is the teaching of the day. It is ill to have been born in these times, but one can make a world within a world. Wrote George Gissing.
As if written illegally, under fear of the police. Bertold Brecht said of Kafka's fiction.
In a letter from Florence Hardy, mentioning that her husband is at his desk: Writing an intensely dismal poem with great spirits.
A Wayward Nun, Dickinson called herself.
I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it. Said Gertrude Stein.
Copies of all the now long lost plays of Sophocles and Euripides still existed at Constantinople until 1203. When the city's churches and libraries were indiscriminately ravaged and torched by the abortive Fourth Crusade.
The value of a classical education, according to a mid nineteenth-century dean of Christ Church, Oxford, one Thomas Gaisford: That it enables us to look down with contempt on those who have no shared its advantages.
We have to believe in free will. We've got no choice. Said Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Byron, briefly, on Southey: Twaddle. On Wordsworth: Drivel. On Keats: Flay him alive.
There's nothing to say that hasn't been said before.
We say nothing but what has been said; the composition and method is ours only. Says Burton in the Enuuch.
Mendelssohn on Liszt: Few brains.
One should always read with a pen in one's hand. Says Delacroix in the Journals.
Tchaivoksky, leaving Bayreuth after the first full four-day performance of The Ring: As if I'd been let out of prison.
[Dostoevsky], while writing The Idiot. They demand from me artistic finish, the purity of poetry, and they point to Turgenev and Goncharov. Let them take a look at the conditions under which I work.
Tolstoy, in his diary, on George Bernard Shaw: His trviliality is astounding.
The world as perceived by Rimbaud: Full of grocers.
God does not inhabit healthy bodies. Said Saint Hildegard of Bingen.
Pound on Milton: Disgusting, coarse-minded, asinine. On Dryden: A lunkhead.
When Chagall paints you do not know if he is asleep or awake. Somewhere or other inside his head there must be an angel.
Lawrence Sterne's love letters to his mistress: Which he sometimes copied word for word from letters he had earlier written his wife.
A latrine, Baudelaire called George Sand.
Diogenes, explaining why people give to beggars, but not to philosophers: Because they think it possible that they themselves might become lame and blind, but they do not expect to turn out philosophers.
Dante tires one quickly. It is like looking at the sun. Said Joyce.
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand. Said Russell.
Woolf: I have the feeling that I shall go mad. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it, but cannot fight any longer.
Putridity and corruption. Said Kierkegaard re [Hegel's lectures, published version].
According to his own wish, Liszt's funeral was conducted without music.
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story. Said Isak Dinesen.
I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanatoriums. Said Scott.
My memory and intellect have gone to wait for me elsewhere. Wrote Michaelangelo to Vasari at eighty-three.
David Markson, Vanishing Point
July 1, 2013
The epigraph to Satantango is a single sentence: “In that...
The epigraph to Satantango is a single sentence: “In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.” Krasznahorkai offers only an oblique attribution—”F.K.”—but its source is Kafka’s novel The Castle. In the eighth chapter of Kafka’s novel, called “Waiting for Klamm,” a “gentleman” asks K to leave: “‘But then I’ll miss the person I’m waiting for,’ said K., flinching.” To which the gentleman replies: “You’ll miss him whether you wait or go.” And K’s triumphant riposte is this: “Then I would rather miss him as I wait.”
In the novel, it’s an example of how K has the defiant courage of his self-defeat. As an obscurely attributed epigraph, however, the sentence becomes stranger: a near oxymoron—whose tone could be despairing or euphoric. “In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.” It is a miniature example of Krasznahorkai’s style—where the everyday is revealed as a tragicomic mystery.
from Adam Thirwell's review of Krasznahorkai's Satantango in the New York Review of Books
I have always argued that the difference between prose an...
I have always argued that the difference between prose and poetry in our age is quite different. Some of the best
poets are prose writers, that is, they do everything that poetry
used to do and doesn’t now. Poetry is prosy now, and not as
interesting as prose, I think—not even close. I’m also reminding people
that this is a homemade object—the cuckoo clock, it says
something, things speak themselves as well. That’s because I’m anti
writing as merely written. I want the oral tradition. You go back to
John Donne’s prose, or any of those writers, you get plenty of
that, you get rhyming, alliteration, you get all kinds of other
connections, all other devices of suggestion, and echoing, and so forth,
because they were talking to hundreds, sometimes a thousand people
in a church. Their sermon had to go out verbally and they had
to use all the mnemonic devices they could, because they wanted
to embed the so-called message. It was the word, it was the “living word,” and all that, that they wanted to stress. It was the
same time the opera begins, masques and so forth. They were
trying to figure out how music and its nature, and language and its
nature, could cohabit. It is for me a great moment because of that.
Ford Maddox Ford has a good passage in one of those endless
books he wrote on the history of English literature about how
prose changed after the protestants won the war in England, how
prose went down the hill as the [former] king of the
hill.
[...]
When you put things on the margin, as
poetry and fiction have certainly been, you free them in many
cases, in many ways, and it’s great to be over there, in a sense, but
it also causes damage. It’s a great incentive, if you’re over on the
margin and feel you should be the center, and then those who are on
the margin, know they’re on the margin, that’s the way it’s
going to be, and they have their desperate little ways to pretend
that the margin is really the center. And there’s the final thing
when the novel was in the center for a while, people like Dickens,
and even up through late James. There was a sense of the social
responsibility of the writer, the impact—people paid attention. Recently,
in Latin American literature, novelists were attended to. A little
anecdote: While talking to Carlos Fuentes about that sort of thing,
and trying to get at why there was such an explosion in Latin
American literature, he said, “We are making our literature. We are
behind the times.” Gertrude Stein said that the United States was the
oldest country in the world because it’s been in the twentieth
century the longest. And they were just getting to this, and Fuentes was
right.
The novelists were celebrated people, and are, even still.
The weight of being somebody who is attended to. [When a writer] came
out on the stage, an athletic complex, usually, to read, the
place would be packed with twenty thousand people. And when they
finished reading, bouquets of flowers would be piled at his feet, and
so orth. And the writer, serious writers would be read by half the population.
In China, the same sort of thing. I was introduced to a
young woman, whose first book had just come out, and she was sort
of disappointed in its sales. She sold a hundred thousand
copies of her first book of poetry. Everybody in China reads. You would
see people everywhere, perched somewhere, reading. And they would run
out of paper, the whole country would run out of paper there
were so many. But the problem is that only in less developed
societies are novelists and poets valued. The Russians are losing that
fast. And they should be, because we writers don’t know what we’re
talking about. Some writers are wise people, I guess, and have
something of intellect to offer to society, but no more than any other
group. You want to listen to Tolstoy? I don’t think so. But then what?
What are the young writers writing for? They’re writing for their
peers in their seminars, the workshops, that’s who. It’s pitiful.
Barth was writing for the greats of the past, whom he had
read, and, again. Fuentes or Vargas Llosa, they read Don Quixote,
I mean. And they’re given ambassadorships, they run for president.
They are important people, so they have to do important things.
And now what we do to something important, we sign a petition
not to arrest a Chinese radical. Big deal. I think it’s
naturally a very difficult thing.
One last thing, when you make less grand the activity, it
becomes a hobby, and it actually multiplies the number of people
writing poems, tons and millions of people are writing poems, all
kinds of people are writing novels, because it’s not hard. The
Yeats poem “Adam’s Curse,” we’re down on our knees scrubbing the
kitchen floor. No, we’re not. They’re writing little poems about
being mistreated by their husband or wife. At least the
Restoration poets wrote about getting into bed.
[...]
When Valéry was in a similar position and was called a Symbolist,
he said, “But we all write differently. What is in common? We dislike
the same things.” That’s true of this group, too. We share
certain dislikes.
I’m on Adorno’s side: that real change has to be structural or formal. And that’s why he
favored Schoenberg over Stravinsky. Stravinsky was a perfectly
bourgeois composer, and he borrowed his motifs, and of course people
held that against him, I don’t—as long as you’re good, that’s
fine. And Adorno and his friends are wrong to say he shouldn’t do
that.
Schoenberg had another structure, and that had, as it’s
merits, not being Stravinsky, or the tradition, the eclectic quality
of Stravinsky, too. You take Schoenberg, however—he was
dictatorial. The positive side of Schoenberg was not very good, I think,
as a model of other things. And to defend the twelve-tone system you just have to point to the fact that you can write
masterpieces with it. It doesn’t mean you have to use it all the time. Fact
is, it’s a rather a specialized occasion, type of formal design. It’s like the
Bauhaus: military, chilling, or the tendency of modern architects to
say, “Live in my house! It’ll be good for you!” These architects
thought that they would make better people. Even Frank Lloyd Wright did.
[...]
You remember the anecdote about Gertrude Stein and the
little bell ringing in her head that told her when she was in the
presence of a genius? And it rang for her with Picasso and Alfred
North Whitehead. Well, it rang once for me: Wittgenstein. It was
just as well to be tongue-tied in his presence because he didn’t want
to hear from you anyway. What we did was listen to him. He
would talk about an issue as if we weren’t there. When I repeat
it, describe it, it sounds so phony, but we listened to him think out
loud, for our benefit. It was, in fact, genuine. It was as if you
could suddenly follow [Wallace] Stevens, say, deciding whether to keep or
remove a word. We listened while he struggled with the pros and cons
of some sort of interpretation of some epistemological problem,
mainly. I was very skeptical, but I immediately saw, I think, that
this guy was something.
William Gass, Rain Taxi interview
First person present tense — a convention that makes
sen...
First person present tense — a convention that makes
sense in French, which hates its preterite, but none in English, where our real
present is present progressive: Not “I pick up the envelope from the table” but
“I am picking up the envelope from the table.” Who could bear to read a story,
let alone a novel, in the true present tense of natural spoken English? So we
get stories written in this artificial, impossible voice. The voice we use for
jokes and anecdotes — “A guy walks into a bar, see” — but not the voice we use
for truth — “No, he really did.” As soon as we want to be believed, we move to
the past tense. But our most pretentious fiction is in the language of jokes.
Regular readers generally know they’re being excluded
when present tense is used for narrative. It’s a shibboleth for the
overeducated, the true believers.
The sad thing is that because young readers
don’t yet recognize the shibboleths, overtaught but underskilled writers of YA
fiction often get away with first person present tense. It worked for Hunger
Games because the story was so powerful; but the choice hampered the sequels.
It’s simply not a natural narrative choice in English; most writers confess
that they are faking it because they use pluperfect for the narrative past when
the past of present-tense narrative is the simple preterite or present perfect.
Orson Scott Card, interviewed
June 20, 2013
David Morris interviews me for The White Review.
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